In March 2026, BrightEdge hosted one of their Spark conferences in San Francisco. Between lavender lattes and brainstorming sessions, including the new Innovation Circle breakfast, the conference made one point clear: success is not about simple rankings. Success is about a cohesive SEO & AI strategy that turns your brand into an authority across an entire digital ecosystem.
Here’s the TL;DR:
- Let’s take a step back to the launch of public AI to look to help us forward.
- How and why Google’s search isn’t the only channel prompting research and discovery.
- The new metrics of success and measurement.
- Optimizing for the AI agent, in addition to humans.
- Break down silos to build scalable success.
Take a Step Back to Look Forward
When OpenAI launched its public preview of ChatGPT in late 2022, it put consumer adoption of AI in turbo speed mode. My co-worker, Danni Winter, and I were in Bristol, UK, leading a conversation on how to “Be Better in AI” one year later for Noble Performs Be Better Bash, and I distinctly remember us saying, “If I had a crystal ball, here is what it would tell me about how AI will change user behavior”.
- More conversational behavior and less “query” behavior when you search
- Adoption and analysis of chatbot behavior across websites
- Greater focus for brands on building authority around business
- Ease of deployment for more personally relevant experiences
It’s been two and a half years since our “crystal ball perspective,” and every one of those points has come true.
As marketers, we have had two and a half years of learning how to balance rapid deployments in AI and Search, changes in how people discover information and content, and the creation of strategies to set us up for success in the future while capitalizing on the landscape right now.
That’s not an easy task. Thankfully, we don’t have to do it all alone.
The network of expertise in Search, AI and discovery behavior is deep, and we’re constantly learning. BrightEdge’s Spark 2026, hosted in San Francisco, brought together search experts, practitioners and leaders to discuss
Why the Search Bar is No Longer the Center of the Universe
Before AI, users were trained to find information in predictable places: a search engine or a specific website. Search has evolved, and we’ve moved away from a world where every journey begins and ends with a Google query.
Now, users choose the platform that fits their immediate expectations. A traveler who wants to get a feel for a destination may go to social media. A professional evaluating software may conduct research using AI tools and third-party review sites. This shift is pulling sole reliance away from the traditional search engine and toward platforms that meet the need of the information they want at that moment in time.
The Reddit Factor
There is a massive trend toward people wanting more audience-informed opinions. People want the perspectives of “real people” over brands. Google began sourcing Reddit threads in the search engine results page in 2023. After this inclusion into the search results, coupled with AI platforms sourcing from Reddit, we’ve seen logged-in and non-logged-in Reddit daily usage surge.
By making Reddit more publicly available, people who want the perspectives of humans over brands now turn to Reddit as a crucial part of their discovery journey. If your brand is not part of the conversation there, you are missing a critical validation point that AI engines now prioritize.
This does not mean simply responding to posts with sales pitches. Reddit is valued for its authenticity and real-world perspectives. Brands must respect this balance by finding ways to enter the conversation in a genuinely helpful way. At Noble, we evaluate the sentiment and perspectives shared on these forums and leverage those insights to improve onsite content or multimedia strategy.
YouTube and Multimedia Dominance
Search is becoming as much about what we see and hear as what we read. Discovery now favors video content alongside written articles. It’s not only about how well optimized your web page is, but it’s also about how your audiences want to consume that information (detailed article, YouTube Short, influencer collaboration on TikTok).
As a BrightEdge Certified Partner, we help brands move from a narrow keyword strategy to a total ecosystem presence. Using the newly launched AI Hyper Cube, we can now pinpoint the exact sources—including specific videos, media and articles—that drive AI answers about your brand. This type of omnichannel data allows us to optimize the off-site brand experience and start influencing the full universe of AI conversations.
Managing AI Sentiment and Reputation
Visibility is only half the battle; sentiment is the other. Recent data from the AI Hyper Cube reveals that different AI engines often portray the same brand in vastly different lights.
For example, Google AI Overviews are currently 44% more likely to skew negatively about a brand compared to ChatGPT, often pulling from old lawsuits or unflattering news coverage.
To manage this, marketers must begin looking off-site to understand how and why AIs are interpreting sentiment. By identifying the specific sources that shape these narratives, we can diagnose reputational risks and strengthen your presence in AI discovery.
Redefining Success in a World of Declining Clicks
Forecasting performance has become a challenge for many marketers as traditional metrics lose their power. We are all seeing declines in Click-Through Rates (CTR) influenced by AI Overviews (AIO). Over the past year, this shift has caused significant uncertainty, leaving many to wonder if their content is still reaching the audience.
The reality is a data paradox: fewer clicks do not necessarily mean less impact. If a user reads a solution provided by your brand within an AIO, you have earned “Share of Mind.” Even without a visit to your website, your brand has influenced the user’s decision-making process.
Measuring Share of Voice with the Enhanced DataCube
To address this shift, BrightEdge has updated its DataCube tool, allowing us to break down visibility based on the modern search makeup. Rather than looking at a single traffic number, we can now analyze data with much greater precision:
- AI vs. Traditional Results: Visibility on pages where AI is present is compared against standard results to see how AIOs are shifting the environment.
- Brand vs. Non-Brand Authority: Performance on branded searches is distinguished from non-brand queries to identify where topical authority actually lies.
- Device Segmentation: Differences between desktop and mobile performance are tracked since AI summaries often display differently depending on screen size.
Beyond the Click
At Noble, we use this granular data to set realistic expectations for our clients. We measure in meaning, not clicks. Through our measurement framework approach, we develop performance KPIs directly tied to business objectives, not micro channel outputs.
This emphasis on a measurement framework gives us focus and alignment on strategic impact. For Search, we’ve talked with our clients about metrics by objective.
- Northstar metrics: These are business goals and objectives for the organization at large.
- Lagging metrics: These are metrics attributed to search performance, but come at a lag due to attribution (whether that’s a 6-12 month pipeline, a 3-month booking window or audience sentiment).
- Leading metrics: These are our optimization KPIs we, as marketers, get to geek out on. Share of mind/voice, CTR, average position, citation or source, traffic, conversions (and the list goes on). We look at leading metrics, data that’s readily available, as an input into what we see for lagging and northstar metrics.
Your New Customer is an AI Agent
Is it the year of the horse or the year of the agent? Looking ahead, your digital strategy must serve two distinct customers: the human and the AI agent. While we have spent decades optimizing the user experience for people, the emergence of autonomous agents has introduced a new layer of technical requirements.
AI agents are sophisticated crawlers that scan your website to extract information. Unlike traditional search bots that simply index pages for a results list, these agents are looking for specific answers to provide to users within a chat interface or an AI summary.
The Risk of Discovery Failure
If an agent cannot easily navigate your site, your brand faces a significant discovery risk. Technical “blockers” like broken paths, 404 errors or shallow content depth cause an agent to get stuck.
When an agent cannot find your value proposition or specific data points, it simply moves on. In this scenario, the AI will not recommend your brand to the human user, effectively making you invisible in the AI-driven search layer.
Dual-Path Optimization
Noble Studios analyzes websites through two different lenses to ensure future-proof discovery:
- For Humans: We continue to prioritize a seamless user experience, rich storytelling and high levels of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
- For AI Agents: We focus on “seamless flow.” This means ensuring your data is structured so an agent can ingest it instantly. Through BrightEdge’s integration with Cloudflare, we can better understand how these agents interact with your digital properties by analyzing bot logs and traffic patterns.
By optimizing for both audiences, we make sure that when a human asks a question, the AI agent has everything it needs to put your brand forward.
Breaking Marketing Silos to Build Scalable Strategies
The current “black box” of AI search means that data is often directional rather than absolute, yet these insights provide a necessary compass for a landscape that changes weekly, if not faster.
This shift is breaking down traditional marketing silos by turning search optimization into a collaboration between social, creative and PR teams. Identifying the specific topics people research during their discovery allows every department to align and work smarter. Noble Studios has partnered with BrightEdge for over a decade, and we’ve expanded that relationship to bring deeper AI visibility to our clients. If you want to see how you can level up your Search strategy from where it is today, we’d love to chat!
